The present invention relates to a printing device capable of printing images such as letters, characters and the like onto the surface of a tape-type recording medium along the longitudinal direction of the tape.
Conventionally, there is proposed a printing device for creating a tape by printing mirror images of characters and the like on the backside of a transparent tape and adhering a double-sided adhesive tape provided with a release paper thereon. The tape created as above can be suitably used for an index and the like as it is adhered to the backside of a video cassette and the like.
Incidentally, in this kind of the printing device, printing is usually carried out in a lateral direction (along the longitudinal direction of a tape). In other words, a character string is printed along the feeding direction of the tape. Hereinafter, such printing is referred to as lateral printing. On the other hand, there exists a printing device with which each character of the character string is printed with a 90-degree rotation as shown in FIG. 8.
An example of a printing device capable of selectively performing lateral printing and the printing as shown in FIG. 8 is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application No. HEI 3-230935, teachings of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
As shown in FIG. 9, however, there is a further desire to print character strings (a train of characters) with 90-degree or 270-degree rotation on the surface of a tape.
In such a case, characters cannot be printed within the width of a tape if the character string is longer than the width of the tape as shown in FIG. 9.